Davis was raised in the middle-class neighborhood of Brooklyn. His mother died at age 47, his father died the following year when Davis was only a teenager, leaving him an orphan with no money, he moved in with his married sister in Bayside, New York City, New York. He attended New York UniversityCollege of Arts and Science, where he graduated magna cum laude, with a degree in Political science and Phi Beta Kappa in 1953, he received a full scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Student Advisers and graduated in 1956. Davis practiced law in a small firm in New York moved on to the firm of Rosenman, Kaye and Freund two years where partner Ralph Colin had CBS as a client. Davis was subsequently hired by a former colleague at the firm, Harvey Schein, to become assistant counsel of CBS subsidiary Columbia Records at age 28, general counsel the following year; as part of a reorganization of Columbia Records Group, group president Goddard Lieberson appointed Davis as administrative vice president and general manager in 1965.

In 1966, CBS formed the Columbia-CBS Group which reorganized CBS's recorded music operations into CBS Records with Davis heading the new unit. The next year, Davis was appointed president and became interested in the newest generation of folk rock and rock and roll. One of his earliest pop signings was the British folk-rock musician Donovan, who enjoyed a string of successful hit singles and albums released in the U. S. on the Epic Records label. That same year, Davis hired 23 year old recording artist Tony Orlando as general manager of Columbia publishing subsidiary April-Blackwood Music, who went on to become vice-president of Columbia/CBS Music and sign Barry Manilow in 1969. In June 1967, at the urging of his friend and business associate Lou Adler, Davis attended the Monterey Pop Festival, he signed Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Columbia went on to sign Laura Nyro, The Electric Flag, The Chambers Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Sweat & Tears, Loggins & Messina and Pink Floyd.

The company, which had avoided rock music, doubled its market share in three years. One of the most commercially successful recordings released during Davis' tenure at Columbia was Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden," in late 1970, it was Davis. The song reached No.1 in 16 countries around the world and remained the biggest selling album by a female country artist for 27 years. In 1972, Davis signed Wind & Fire to Columbia Records. One of his most recognized accomplishments was signing the Boston group Aerosmith to Columbia Records in the early 1970s at New York City's Max's Kansas City; the accomplishment was mentioned in the 1979 Aerosmith song "No Surprize", where Steven Tyler sings, "Old Clive Davis said he's gonna make you a star, just the way you are." Starting on December 30, 1978, Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead changed the lyrics of the Dead standard "Jack Straw" in concert from "we used to play for silver, now we play for life," to "we used to play for acid, now we play for Clive." One of the last bands Davis tried to sign to Columbia Records was the proto-punk band Death.

City Shrouded in Shadow is a video game for the PlayStation 4 developed by Granzella, who confirmed that it is the spiritual successor to their Disaster Report series of games. The objective of the game is to escape a city ravaged by battles between giant monsters, kaiju and heroes from famous live-action and animated Japanese series such as Godzilla, the Ultra Series, Gamera and Neon Genesis Evangelion; the game is set in the fictional Ichi City in Japan, being beset by sinister shadows and giant monsters. The player will be able to choose between either playing as a man called Ken Misaki or a woman called Miharu Matsuhara, with the objective being to try to escape the city; the game was announced on September 17, 2015. It was directed by Kazuma Kujo. Takashi Watabe is producing on behalf of publisher BandaiNamco. Ultraman was confirmed to appear in the game on 16 February 2016; the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu confirmed. Godzilla had been teased by having his shadowy silhouette appear in screenshots.

An Evangelion mecha was teased to appear. Famitsu confirmed in May 2017 that Gamera would appear in the game. In May 2017 it was announced that the PS Vita version was cancelledand the title became a PS4-only exclusive; the game launched on October 2017 in Japan. The game sold 48,935 copies within its first week on sale in Japan, placing it at number two on the all format sales charts. Official website

Kent Johnson is an American poet, translator and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles. Since the late 1990s, Johnson has been thought to be the author of the Araki Yasusada writings, which a reviewer for the Nation magazine, in 1998, called “the most controversial work of poetry since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.” Johnson, has never claimed authorship of the material, presenting himself only as “executor” of an archive composed by a writer, or writers, whose choice has been to maintain a principled anonymity in relation to the work. In recent years, the Yasusada discussion has moved from the realm of literary scandal and gossip into considerations of more scholarly kind, a substantial number of academic articles have by now engaged the topic and con. In 2011, a book of critical studies and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada, was published in England, to which Johnson was one of eighteen contributors.

Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War was published in 2005. As the first book of poetry in the United States to respond to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the subject of numerous reviews and blog commentaries, a good deal of the latter hostile; the title poem of the collection, “Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, or: Get the Hood Back On,” angrily confronts the torture committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, though it does so in a manner quite non-conventional for “anti-war” poetry: The poem proceeds in a series of stanzas set in the voices of American military prison guards, who calmly chat with Iraqi prisoners and sociably describe their quite normal backgrounds at home, before graphically informing the prisoners of the tortures to which they will be subjected. The poem, concludes unexpectedly when the voice of a generic U. S. poet joins the chorus of torturers, in good-natured tone tells his captive to stop pleading and just accept the horror of his fate, because there is, after all, nothing that poetry can do to help him.

More Johnson became the focus of controversy, including threatened legal action, when he published a book that proposed, by means of an elaborate, forensically detailed hypothesis, that the poet Kenneth Koch may have been the hidden author of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” one of Frank O’Hara’s canonical poems, composing it shortly after O’Hara’s death, placing it under his late friend’s name in a sui generis act of comradeship and mourning. First published in a limited edition in 2011, an expanded, second edition of this book, titled A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "by" Frank O’Hara, was published in 2012 and named a “Book of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement. Johnson lived most of his childhood and adolescence in Montevideo, returning to work there in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, on two extended visits, he worked with the Sandinista Revolution as a literacy and Adult Education teaching volunteer in rural zones of Nicaragua.

Since 1991, he has taught Spanish at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois. In 2004, he was named State Teacher of the Year by the Illinois Community College Board of Trustees, he has received a Pushcart Book of the Month Award, an Ohio Board of Regents Grant for research in the U. S. S. R. an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a PEN Translation Grant, a Finalist nomination for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a travel grant from the University of Chile, a Visiting Writer Grant from the U. S. Embassy in Uruguay. Waves of Drifting Snow. Ox Head Press, 1986. Dear Lacan: An Analysis in Correspondence. CCCP Translation Series, 2003; the Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek. CCCP Translation Series, 2003; the Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek. Skanky Possum Press, 2004. Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets. BlazeVOX Books, 2005. Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War. Effing Press, 2005.

I Once Met. Longhouse Books, 2007. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. Shearsman Books, 2008. 5 Works from the Rejection Group. Habenicht Press, 2012.. Both Both Series, 2012. Homage to Villon. Beard of Bees, 2014. Works and Days of the fénéon collective, Delete Press, 2014. Prize List. Delete Press, 2015. A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua. West End Press, 1985. Have You Seen a Red Curtain in my Weary Chamber: Poems and Essays by Tomás Borge Martínez. Curbstone Press, 1989. Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Shambhala, 1990. Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1992. Joyous Young Pines. Juniper Press, 1995. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. Roof Books, 1997. Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. University of California Press, 2002 Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Letters of Araki Yasusada. Combo Books, 2005; the Night, Jamie Saenz. Princeton University Press, 2007. Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay.